The Cost of Course Development
Ever wonder how much time it actually takes to build a course from scratch? For a full semester course, anywhere between 2-5 months.
This is exactly why you’ll find instructors and course designers burning the midnight oil or giving up their summers, just to get courses ready. There’s simply not enough time in the regular workday to make it all happen. When a course takes months to develop, incorporating new research costs additional weeks of revision. Updating assessments to match revised content usually means starting over. Ensuring alignment between readings, objectives, lessons, and evaluations requires constant cross-checking, which most instructors lack the time for, given their typical 2-4 course teaching loads.
Course development and instructional design is complicated.
Every change you make in a course has a ripple effect. Update the reading for Week 7? Now you’re tweaking that week’s discussion questions, fixing Week 8’s recap (because it referenced outdated material), reworking Week 9’s scaffolding, and likely rewriting assessment questions as well.
Research on backward design implementation shows that balancing institutional standards, departmental expectations, diverse learning needs, and accurate assessment requires thoughtful integration of content knowledge, pedagogical strategies, and assessment methods. Each component affects the others, creating a web of dependencies that makes changes exponentially complex.
A changing development reality
For a long time, we assumed building a quality course had to take months of painstaking effort. But really, that just mixed up two very different jobs: the routine checks, and the actual creative work of designing how you’ll teach. Curriculus proves you can automate the routine stuff and still keep quality high.
- Traditional: 3-6 months, That's just about a half semester of work to build a semester's worth of course work.
- With Curriculus: 3-5 days
Curriculus frees up instructors to do what they do best by handling all the nitty-gritty details that usually slow things down. It takes care of thousands of tiny checks and alignments—stuff that would take weeks if you had to do it all yourself.
So, what if there was a better way to handle all this?
Curriculus steps in here. Instead of making instructors track every single connection by hand, it keeps all those relationships organized behind the scenes. The result? You can iterate quickly while maintaining high quality, without losing your focus on the details.
Here’s how the process works out:
- Day 1: Material Submission - Share your readings, existing syllabus, and course objectives with Curriculus. The system immediately begins extracting pedagogical value from your materials.
- Day 2: First Draft Review - Receive a complete course structure with skill progressions, lesson outlines, and assessment frameworks. Provide feedback on the pedagogical approach and any adjustments needed.
- Day 3: Second Draft Refinement - Review refined lessons incorporating your feedback. The systematic architecture ensures all changes propagate correctly through related materials.
- Days 4+: Polish and Personalize - With the structural work complete, focus your time on adding personal touches, incorporating specific examples, and preparing for actual teaching.
Curriculus turns 2-4 months of structural busywork into 4 days, so you can 95% of your allotted time on the actual pedagogy and teaching instead of 50% on structure and 50% on pedagogy and teaching.
Quality through systematic design
When you separate routine tasks from actual teaching work, you maintain high quality and save a significant amount of time. Most of the hours in traditional course development are spent on tasks such as checking alignment, ensuring everything matches, tracking references, and updating materials. Important? Yes. Is it what instructors prefer to do with their limited time? Not so much.
Curriculus automates these mechanical verifications while preserving space for pedagogical expertise. The system handles:
- Automatic prerequisite chain verification
- Reference resolution and attribution
- Alignment checking between objectives and assessments
- Consistency validation across all materials
- Dependency tracking for updates
This means instructors can finally spend their energy where it counts: shaping their teaching style, connecting with students, and adapting to whatever comes up.
Looking forward
When you can build or revise a course in days, it means you have an entirely different outlook on course development. If you assume that everyone dedicates 2 months to course development, then under the current process, half of that time is consumed by manual organization work. If Curriculus removes all that overhead, that doesn’t mean that course development will naturally fall to 1 month. Rather, we believe (based on what we’ve seen with our own eyes), instructors and course designers will spend the same amount or more time on designing the course itself, because they’re not spending all their energy going uphill. In other words, a marathon is a marathon. But running one through redwood trees and rolling hills is far more enjoyable than running one alongside a traffic-jammed highway. We take away the traffic jams and the honking horns so you can run your marathon focused.
About Curriculus
Curriculus helps course developers and instructional designers work faster and smarter. By automating the routine checks and offering features that actually make course design easier, Curriculus lets you focus on what you do best, teaching. Want to see how it works? Check out curriculus.com.